Symphony 5

Funeral march: Stormily agitated: Scherzo: Adagietto: Rondo - Finale

What a monumental piece! In every way Mahler's Fifth Symphony is prodigious not least to the performers. Of all the large-scale works that the Norfolk Symphony Orchestra has presented to its audience in recent concerts, including The Planets and Shostakovich 5, this is the biggest challenge. Why? You will surely know by the end of the performance. Mahler calls on every resource of the orchestra both technically and musically; the work is physically demanding; instruments are pushed to their limits as the composer demands extremes of sonority and range; emotions are drained. The end result is totally rewarding; a musical experience almost beyond belief.

It's hard to know where to start so some basic facts might be in order with some words from the composer to clarify his intentions. The Fifth Symphony, completed in 1902 and first performed in Cologne in 1904 with the composer conducting, was a watershed for Mahler, "I cannot understand how I could have written at that time so much like a beginner. Clearly the routine I had acquired in the first four symphonies deserted me altogether, as if a totally new message demanded a new technique. It is the sum of all the suffering I have been compelled to endure at the hands of life!" Further to these new artistic ideas, Mahler's personal life had also been transformed by his marriage to Alma Maria Schindler and the imminent birth of his first child. For this glorious summer of 1902 he could spend time in musical solitude in his "Composer's House" deep in the woods of Maiernigg. There, undisturbed by the distractions of his conducting duties, he brought forth this most astonishing musical creation. His sources were eclectic. Talking to friends whilst passing a country fair he pointed to the blaring bands, barrel organs, shooting galleries and excited populace. "Do you hear that? That's polyphony - and that's where I get it from…..That is how - from a lot of different sources - the themes must come, and like this they must be entirely different from each other in rhythm and melody. What the artist has to do is to organize them into an intelligible entity."

To further these ideas, Mahler revolutionised orchestral techniques making the orchestra sound as never before. So particular was he about his ideas that, as far as he could he left nothing to chance, adding copious footnotes and instructions to his score for performers and conductor. Still he worried over details and what others would do to his idiosyncratic music. Writing to Alma in 1904 after the first rehearsal of the Fifth Symphony's "Scherzo" he said, "The Scherzo is the very devil of a movement. I see it will cause endless problems! Conductors for the next fifty years will take it too fast and make nonsense of it, and the public…..What are they to say to this primeval music, this foaming, this roaring, raging sea of sound, to these dancing stars, to these irridescent breakers? Oh that I might give my symphony its first performance fifty years after my death."

He had a point. This man who was so meticulous about how his music should be played has probably been subjected to more abuse from conductors than any other composer. For instance, it is on record that Mahler's timing for the famous "Adagietto" was around nine minutes. Recent performances have been as flighty as seven and a half minutes and as tedious as fourteen minutes. In a movement which is the shortest of the five movements of the symphony this surely shows undue excess. Of course, the "Adagietto" is almost inextricably bound up in our minds with Visconti's film of Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" where the music was perhaps overloaded with tragedy. The conductor William Mengelberg, a great Mahlerian, says that the composer told him that this beautiful music was a love-song for Mahler's bride, Alma. Whatever, with its scoring for strings and harp alone, it is an oasis in the general turmoil of the symphony and all the more poignant for its strategic placing after the first three movements.

Now for the overall scheme. The first movement is headed "Funeral March" with the sub-plot, "in measured step: stern: like a funeral cortege." A solo trumpet declaims a quasi-military fanfare before the full might of the orchestra is unleashed only to fall to a quieter mood as the strings gently intone their funereal theme. The dark mood is literally shattered by a passage of the utmost passion; the trumpet shrieks its message; the strings wail theirs. These are the contrasting ideas immediately evident in the forceful opening of the second movement, "Stormily agitated". The two movements, twenty seven minutes in all, form the first part of the Symphony after which Mahler specified, not without psychological reason, a significant pause. The exhilarating "Scherzo", a far cry from similarly named movements in his predecessors' music, features an "obbligato" horn part as well as the full complement of orchestral horns in tracing an enormous range of music and emotions. One minute we are at an Austrian knees-up, the next swept up by a torrent of sound. The repose of the "Adagietto" is followed directly by the "Rondo" Finale by way of a held note on the solo horn. The composer's themes are simple, perhaps redolent of the countryside, yet he creates a compelling structure always leading to the great "chorale", an affirmation of faith and the culmination of an extraordinary piece of music.